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The Goal of “Aliveness” “We need a spirit of readiness, expectation, and vitality to stay alive to the moments that either teach us the meaning of life or allow us to share that vision of generosity with others.”
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t is good to see you all after what I hope was a great winter break with family and friends. I hope this return day schedule eases your transition back to school, allows you to reflect on the good work and promise of the 2017-2018 school year, and focus on the crucial responsibilities we have for one another. Over the vacation, I read an essay titled, “Waking up to the Gift of Aliveness,” written by a professor of philosophy at Harvard University, Sean Kelly. The piece pays tribute to a teacher Kelly had in his undergraduate career, Hubert Dreyfus, and the source of the tribute is an epiphany created by finding and reading a long forgotten and discarded sentence from a notebook from a lecture class: the sentence read: “The goal of life, for Pascal, is not happiness, peace, or fulfilment, but aliveness.” What made this moment an epiphany was that Kelly read that note decades after he had taken Dreyfus’ course. In fact, Kelly had turned back to his old notebook precisely because he, now a professor, was teaching the philosophy of Blaise Pascal in one of the courses he now taught at Harvard. In the intervening years, the notebook had been lost and forgotten, only to reappear miraculously not as a collection of observations that Kelly needed to remember for an exam—but instead a philosophy, an ethic he could live by. Both for Sean Kelly and for us here at St. Andrew’s, the Dreyfus quotation—the goal of life is aliveness—is a powerful one for us to consider and remember in the winter and in the opening moments of 2018. It reminds us that our very lives are miraculous, full of great potential for dramatic and life and world changing contributions, discoveries, innovations. For Kelly, the phrase from his notes resonated because as an adult he realized that what we call the routines and schedules of life do at times lull us to sleep, make us believe that the spontaneous, the miraculous, the essence of life are forever buried under the essential business and routine of our lives. John Gardner described our passive and unfulfilled 61
